I made this facillity for my 5e eberron game & put together the gm notes I used going in figuring others could make use of it

In my game, this was a facility used to createthe eberron equivalent of MRE’s in Breland during the war. The timestop preserved hot stew ration contained within each single serving ration are much preferred over hard tack biscuits & jerky. At some point during the war Karrnath dumped a bunch of zombies, many of them the intelligent Elite sort on the facility & it was determined that this particular facility was no longer viable if reclaimed thanks to its location in relation to the border. Players can be sent to the facility for any reason you feel is fitting to your game. In mine, a Jorasco Heir living in New Cyre thought that perhaps he could influence the locals to “find” a stolen Orien caravan leader’s dragonmarked focus item & the tax certificates for travel of the caravan they were hired to guard through the Brelish
border into Darguun. The items in question were stolen by a changeling posing as the Orien Heir caravan master while the players were off dealing with a snape hunt into some Dhakaani ruins that was put in motion by the Changeling themselves & urging of the actual Orien Heir.

While timestop is by no means a low level spell, the version used here is much weaker & is only able to cover an area the size of a specially prepared jar about the size of a bowl of soup & has a considerably longer duration. A Dragonmark focus device (recovered years back in my game) would have been used to enchant each ration; but in your game the players might be sent out by Cannith specifically to recover them.

This facility is put together based on my cleaned up GM notes & I'd love it if some discussion came about, I may do similar with other locations I've made or will make if there is interest. With my style of GMing I have a bunch of baddies that I expect to be using here & there but they move around & are actively doing stuff that allows me to srop them in where I think it will be interesting, thats the reason there is no "xyz baddies are in this room" type blurbs

tetrasodium wrote:
While timestop is by no means a low level spell, the version used here is much weaker & is only able to cover an area the size of a specially prepared jar about the size of a bowl of soup & has a considerably longer duration.

I would probably say that it's not so much "time stop" (since, regardless of the size, that's still *extremely* strong magic) as it is a modified Gentle Repose (stops corpses from rotting; why can't it prevent other biological matter from doing the same?) combined with Prestidigitation (one of the options for its effect is "You chill, warm, or flavor up to 1 cubic foot of nonliving material for 1 hour.") upon opening the container. Combining "doesn't rot" with "makes it the appropriate temperature upon opening" makes a lot more sense than the ability to explicitly stop time (any magic that messes with time is always really high level) and fits with the more "industrial" theme for magic item creation in Eberron (one group of people makes the lid and outer cup that are enchanted with an elongated one-use gentle repose that breaks when the seal is broken; another group makes the inner cup that triggers the appropriate version of prestidigitation on the contents when the seal is broken).

As to it being taken over by the Karrnathi military, if it was owned and operated by House Cannith (I actually think it would make more sense as House Ghallanda, or at least as a joint venture between the two, since Ghallanda is the "food" dragonmarked house), I'm pretty sure that would have made it a non-military target: the Dragonmarked Houses were all explicitly neutral during the war, selling their goods and services to all sides. Attacking a facility run by one of them would be a *very* quick way to suddenly lose the services of *all* of them (which would be disastrous for *any* nation's war efforts) since one of the things that the Dragonmarked Houses make sure to stick together on is their independence from the Five Nations.

If you want to it be abandoned because of the war, it needs to either have been willingly abandoned by the Dragonmarked Houses (perhaps, while the food it provided was explicitly better, it was significantly more expensive; combined with the growing use of troops that didn't require constant upkeep, i.e. the warforged and Karrnathi undead, it was decided that running the facility just wasn't worth it any more; perhaps it was abandoned because there was a major battle that was going to be fought very near it and it was abandoned to avoid collateral damage) or it needs to have been a legitimate military target (i.e. it was owned and operated by Breland rather than the Dragonmarked Houses; they might have contracted some Cannith workers to make the containers and Ghallanda workers to make the food, but it was owned by the Brelish government, which made it a legit military target).

tetrasodium wrote:
While timestop is by no means a low level spell, the version used here is much weaker & is only able to cover an area the size of a specially prepared jar about the size of a bowl of soup & has a considerably longer duration.

I would probably say that it's not so much "time stop" (since, regardless of the size, that's still *extremely* strong magic) as it is a modified Gentle Repose (stops corpses from rotting; why can't it prevent other biological matter from doing the same?) combined with Prestidigitation (one of the options for its effect is "You chill, warm, or flavor up to 1 cubic foot of nonliving material for 1 hour.") upon opening the container. Combining "doesn't rot" with "makes it the appropriate temperature upon opening" makes a lot more sense than the ability to explicitly stop time (any magic that messes with time is always really high level) and fits with the more "industrial" theme for magic item creation in Eberron (one group of people makes the lid and outer cup that are enchanted with an elongated one-use gentle repose that breaks when the seal is broken; another group makes the inner cup that triggers the appropriate version of prestidigitation on the contents when the seal is broken).

As to it being taken over by the Karrnathi military, if it was owned and operated by House Cannith (I actually think it would make more sense as House Ghallanda, or at least as a joint venture between the two, since Ghallanda is the "food" dragonmarked house), I'm pretty sure that would have made it a non-military target: the Dragonmarked Houses were all explicitly neutral during the war, selling their goods and services to all sides. Attacking a facility run by one of them would be a *very* quick way to suddenly lose the services of *all* of them (which would be disastrous for *any* nation's war efforts) since one of the things that the Dragonmarked Houses make sure to stick together on is their independence from the Five Nations.

If you want to it be abandoned because of the war, it needs to either have been willingly abandoned by the Dragonmarked Houses (perhaps, while the food it provided was explicitly better, it was significantly more expensive; combined with the growing use of troops that didn't require constant upkeep, i.e. the warforged and Karrnathi undead, it was decided that running the facility just wasn't worth it any more; perhaps it was abandoned because there was a major battle that was going to be fought very near it and it was abandoned to avoid collateral damage) or it needs to have been a legitimate military target (i.e. it was owned and operated by Breland rather than the Dragonmarked Houses; they might have contracted some Cannith workers to make the containers and Ghallanda workers to make the food, but it was owned by the Brelish government, which made it a legit military target).

I like the idea for using gentle repose and prestidigitation to preserve & reheat the stew with opening the jar being the trigger that breaks the very extended/looping gentle repose spell to trigger the reheating of the stew over a modified timestop & wish I had thought of it. since my players have not looked into the "how it works" part yet, I'll probably start explaining it like that when they eat one.
You are right about it almost certainly being more brelish (or whatever) even if it employs some folks from Cannith & such. My players later discovered that the karrnathi assault was less about dealing a blow to breland than it was about taking out the warforged titan stationed there. Thanks to Irma knocking off three weeks of play (oops many of us are putting up shutters>kinda watching a hurricane bear down on us so we will skip this week too>omfg it's effing hot & most of us are still without power) that thread about someone recovering the titan's control rod(?) device for valenar to use against darguun has not really had a chance to develop yet so I left out that my zombies were being used to search the place for the rod that was lost in the original skirmish.

It does make sense for Gallahandra to be involved to some degree I agree, but I ran this for a bunch of players with one session of experience with eberron & didn't want to overload them too much too quick. I pretty heavily use gallahandra with pretty much any inn & really play up their talents when that stuff comes up so am not too worried after the fact. Others running it might want to mention that the notes on the stew in the room with the safe/ritual grease scroll involved house gallahandra if I were to pick a place that makes the most sense to drop them into the mix; but if it's still functioning they could be anywhere depending on what you are doing there in your game.

Note 1e and 4e both have a low level spell/ritual called "preserve" which is meant for preventing decay, does not require a container, and is potentially in Ghallanda territory. I think most editions have a version of purify food and drink, which is also low level and definitely in Ghallanda's wheelhouse.

Also note that one of the major exports from Xen'drik is Eternal Rations, made from long corn and/or gurk'ash meat, which never spoil. So there is plenty of competition for Cannith's faux-fridge, if you want to have some corporate sabotage/trade wars going on. Maybe the assault on the Cannith facility was bankrolled by a trade consortium with interests in Xen'drik.

Beoric wrote:Note 1e and 4e both have a low level spell/ritual called "preserve" which is meant for preventing decay, does not require a container, and is potentially in Ghallanda territory.

I couldn't find the 4e version of "Preserve" so I'm not sure which ritual you're referring to, but, either way, it's kind of irrelevant since 4e focused pretty much entirely upon adventuring rituals and Traveler's Feast, which will feed an entire adventuring party for a day, is only level 4. On that same token, Everlasting Provisions are a level 4 common magic item that basically casts Traveler's Feast for free every day so even Traveler's Feast is kind of irrelevant once you hit mid-heroic (common means that you can buy it pretty much anywhere and 4e's economy means that it will be pocket change after only a few levels).

4e's rules focused disproportionately on what PC adventurers would use, going out of its way as much as possible to mitigate accounting whenever possible. I've both played and run games in which the GM just hands out Everlasting Provisions or completely ignores food and water unless it's relevant to the story. As such, I think it's less important to find explicit mechanical underpinnings for the system than it is to just find something close enough and say that the industrially minded folks of Eberorn found a way to do it.

I think most editions have a version of purify food and drink, which is also low level and definitely in Ghallanda's wheelhouse.

Well, purify food and drink simply removes poison and disease from whatever it is cast upon. It wouldn't do anything for flavor or edibility, though, since we're talking about Eberron MREs here, I could *totally* see then food being completely unpreserved, left to basically rot in its protected packaging, and then made edible (if only barely) while smelly and tasting truly vile by the purify food and drink spell that is cast upon it as soon as the packaging is broken. Just like real MREs, pretty much everyone would rather eat anything *except* one of those packets, even if it's *technically* healthy and *technically* nourishing.

Perhaps you could raid ideas from the advert that claimed that Pot Noodles were dug out of mines in Wales and drop your factory under the ground and have miners harvest some sort of "Kyber Noodles" to make the stew that goes into each container.

Someone has stuck some of the adverts up onto YouTube: Pot Noodle 'Crumlin Noodle Mine' Campaign. They are pretty cheesy, so I'd suggest you just go with the base idea, rather than try to have "Welsh dwarves" in Eberron.

You enchant a quantity of nonliving organic material so that it resists all natural deterioration. Rot, mold, consuming vermin, and the like all leave the enchanted material alone. Damage intentionally done can still harm the material.

Your Arcana or Nature check determines how much material you can affect with one ritual casting.

...

Published in Dragon Magazine 366, page(s) 30

4e Everlasting Provisions would completely rewrite an economy based on "wide magic" if commonly available; an Eberron campaign might want to restrict them.

1e Purify Food and Drink worked differently from the 5e version; it did make spoiled food edible. Although even the 5e version "purifies" food, so if an item based on it was continually in operation, arguably the food would never spoil in the first place.

1e Purify Food and Drink worked differently from the 5e version; it did make spoiled food edible. Although even the 5e version "purifies" food, so if an item based on it was continually in operation, arguably the food would never spoil in the first place.

I described it as kind of being the equivalent to canned goods. Sure it's a more expensive/labor intensive process akin to the early 1800's equivalents, but thanks to magic it's in some ways better than even what we have now. A costco (or larger )sized jar of $PerishableFruit/vegetable being opened up by a vendor halfway across khorvaire to sell freshly picked $thing that took a month or six traveling on a house Orien road from $FarOff could be a commonplace thing. Sure it would be more expensive than buying & consuming it wherever it was grown & picked, but it wouldn't need to be rushed by nonstop airship or something akin to how we use refrigeration & various other means of preservation to transport perishable goods without needing to use the more expensive fastest means of transport

There's always been some areas eberron is more/less advanced than us & ways they are similarly but wildly differently advanced, this could just be one more way of filling that with a fairly mundane substance. My players were pretty excited & spent an unexpected but of time talking about how great the timestop rations are over regular ones & it doesn't actually really change anything that needs to be considered on a mechanical level when thinking about balance

1e Purify Food and Drink worked differently from the 5e version; it did make spoiled food edible. Although even the 5e version "purifies" food, so if an item based on it was continually in operation, arguably the food would never spoil in the first place.

I described it as kind of being the equivalent to canned goods. Sure it's a more expensive/labor intensive process akin to the early 1800's equivalents, but thanks to magic it's in some ways better than even what we have now. A costco (or larger )sized jar of $PerishableFruit/vegetable being opened up by a vendor halfway across khorvaire to sell freshly picked $thing that took a month or six traveling on a house Orien road from $FarOff could be a commonplace thing. Sure it would be more expensive than buying & consuming it wherever it was grown & picked, but it wouldn't need to be rushed by nonstop airship or something akin to how we use refrigeration & various other means of preservation to transport perishable goods without needing to use the more expensive fastest means of transport

There's always been some areas eberron is more/less advanced than us & ways they are similarly but wildly differently advanced, this could just be one more way of filling that with a fairly mundane substance. My players were pretty excited & spent an unexpected but of time talking about how great the timestop rations are over regular ones & it doesn't actually really change anything that needs to be considered on a mechanical level when thinking about balance

I don't see what's wrong with making this a mundane thing either. All of the houses have mundane business operations alongside the ones that involve Dragonmarks.

The actually put Admiral Nelson's into a cask of brandy (and then a coffin filled with wine) back in 1805. So, if they knew how to preserve things back then, it's not unreasonable to have some access to mundane preservatives in Eberron.

You could still have magical preservatives too, if you want. They would just work a lot better than mundane preservatives. The non-magical stuff could be along the lines of ingredients, like baked beans or pickled onions, and the magical containers could be preserving fully made meals.

I think that the main use of your fully made "instant meals" would be to supply people under siege conditions, who don't have a lot of time for cooking. So the market for that would mostly be during the most aggressive periods of the Last War, with the market mostly collapsing at the end of the war. That gives you a good excuse to have this facility exist and also to make it get abandoned (so you can use it as an adventuring location). (And if you don't want to have the market totally collapse, then make this a secondary manufacturing location, with the manufacturing pulled back to another facility elsewhere.)

1e Purify Food and Drink worked differently from the 5e version; it did make spoiled food edible. Although even the 5e version "purifies" food, so if an item based on it was continually in operation, arguably the food would never spoil in the first place.

I described it as kind of being the equivalent to canned goods. Sure it's a more expensive/labor intensive process akin to the early 1800's equivalents, but thanks to magic it's in some ways better than even what we have now. A costco (or larger )sized jar of $PerishableFruit/vegetable being opened up by a vendor halfway across khorvaire to sell freshly picked $thing that took a month or six traveling on a house Orien road from $FarOff could be a commonplace thing. Sure it would be more expensive than buying & consuming it wherever it was grown & picked, but it wouldn't need to be rushed by nonstop airship or something akin to how we use refrigeration & various other means of preservation to transport perishable goods without needing to use the more expensive fastest means of transport

There's always been some areas eberron is more/less advanced than us & ways they are similarly but wildly differently advanced, this could just be one more way of filling that with a fairly mundane substance. My players were pretty excited & spent an unexpected but of time talking about how great the timestop rations are over regular ones & it doesn't actually really change anything that needs to be considered on a mechanical level when thinking about balance

I don't see what's wrong with making this a mundane thing either. All of the houses have mundane business operations alongside the ones that involve Dragonmarks.

The actually put Admiral Nelson's into a cask of brandy (and then a coffin filled with wine) back in 1805. So, if they knew how to preserve things back then, it's not unreasonable to have some access to mundane preservatives in Eberron.

You could still have magical preservatives too, if you want. They would just work a lot better than mundane preservatives. The non-magical stuff could be along the lines of ingredients, like baked beans or pickled onions, and the magical containers could be preserving fully made meals.

I think that the main use of your fully made "instant meals" would be to supply people under siege conditions, who don't have a lot of time for cooking. So the market for that would mostly be during the most aggressive periods of the Last War, with the market mostly collapsing at the end of the war. That gives you a good excuse to have this facility exist and also to make it get abandoned (so you can use it as an adventuring location). (And if you don't want to have the market totally collapse, then make this a secondary manufacturing location, with the manufacturing pulled back to another facility elsewhere.)

Another potential market that fits Breland surprisingly well given its unintended coincidence is Sharn . Real estate is not cheap in sharn & things like a kitchen for preparing/cooking food might be out of the price rage for a good number of residents. A cupboard full of ready made hot meals just waiting to be opened might be a nice enough alternative to finding a place open now/in the rain that it's a market worth targeting even for those who can afford a kitchen but won't always feel like it.